Test string for range of characters

[haku]

Regular expressions - I suck at them. Can someone give me a hand? I need to know how to test a string to make sure its only alphabetic characters, and no letters or other characters.

 

Thanks in advance!

[soycharliente]

I think I'm right...

 

'^[a-zA-Z]$'

 

There is also a board SOLELY for regex questions.

http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/board,43.0.html

[cry of war]

ctype_alpha("$value") letters only

ctype_digit("$value") numbers only

ctype_alnum("$value") letters and numbers only

 

above can only equal true or false

 

 

$value="hello world";

 

if (ctype_alpha("$value")==true)

{echo "Good Job";}

else

{echo "WTF?";}

 

 

output=> Good Job

[haku]

Thanks to both of you!

 

I didn't realize there is a regex section of the board. I will have to use that in the future.

 

I need a regex expression. I'm actually not testing for alphabetic characters to tell the truth, I'm testing for Japanese kana, so the three functions in the previous post wont work. But I didn't think anyone here would know how to write regex expressions for Japanese, so I'm just going to substitute from a regex expression.

[discomatt]

'^[A-z]*$' is what you want...

 

if (preg_match('/^[A-z]*$/', $subject)) {
// string matched
} else {
// contains non-alphabet characters
}

 

Cry Of War's is better, if you don't mind spaces in the string.

[cry of war]

Wait the words or the Symbols?

[effigy]

I'm testing for Japanese kana

 

I think this will do it: /[\x{3040}-\x{309F}\x{30A0}-\x{30FF}]/u

[haku]

Thanks effigy! I'll try that out when I get to work. Thats great, cause I played around with it for quite a while.

[haku]

I tried that effigy, but that was for ascii encoding, and I am using EUC-JP, so it didn't match. Im looking on the japanese net now to see what the Japanese folk have to say about this.

[haku]

Thanks for the help everyone. I managed to get my code working. I thought it would be as simple as substituting the first and last katakana (one of the Japanese alphabets) into the English regex, but it wasn't. In the end, it was this code that did it for me:

 

if (mb_ereg('[｡-ﾟ]', $string))
{
echo "string is katakana";
}
else
{
echo "string is not katakana";
}

 

I don't imagine that many people will need this code for anything, but I thought I would post it here in case someone searches for it sometime.

 

Note: This works in EUC-JP encoding. I don't know and doubt that it will work with other encodings (Shift_JIS and utf-8 for example)